Haynes and Boone, LLP Partner and Co-Chair of the firm’s DEI Committee (DEIC) Vera Suarez is a 2024 Diversity Champion in the World Intellectual Property Review Diversity Top 100 List. She is one of only 23 attorneys in the Diversity Champions list, which “celebrates those who have worked relentlessly to create a brighter future for all aspiring attorneys, regardless of their background, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation or creed.”
As a co-chair of the DEIC, Suarez has played a key role in developing the firm’s DEI initiatives. Haynes Boone’s DEI work has garnered it many accolades over the past year, including:
- ABA Alexander Award for Excellence in Pipeline Diversity
- Bloomberg Law’s DEI Framework
- Chambers Associate Survey Commitment to DEI
- Vault DEI Rankings
- 21st Overall Ranking in the American Lawyer Diversity Scorecard
Suarez is a registered patent attorney and partner in the Dallas office. As a patent and trade secret strategist, she counsels her clients on maximizing their ROI on IP spend while minimizing IP risk exposure. Not only does she develop and manage patent portfolios in a wide variety of technology areas, but she also advises clients with respect to patent validity, freedom to operate, product clearance and preparing IP portfolios for acquisition.
Suarez consistently uses her voice to support diversity in innovation, with focus on the reduction of the inventor gender gap, in articles for Bloomberg Law (‘Aspiring Women Inventors Still Stalled by University Patriarchy’) and World IP Review (‘Navigating the Anti-D&I Backlash in the U.S.’). In addition to promoting gender parity in the patent space to the wider IP community, Suarez helps her clients establish best practice policies that are designed to promote inventor gender parity.
When advising her clients, Suarez often relies on her engineering experience, which includes working on an offshore oil rig off the coast of Mexico and performing a countless number of risk management analyses as a field engineer. She is a trusted advisor to her clients and was recently included in the "Ones to Watch" category of The Best Lawyers in America, (Woodward/White, Inc., 2023). She was also lead patent attorney in a Federal Circuit case that overturned U.S. Patent Office precedent and was recognized among the biggest patent cases in 2021 (Law360).
